Sunshine Cleaning (2008) DVD

For all its claims to being a realistic look at the life of a working class single mum in small town America, Sunshine Cleaning is a fantastical, revoltingly glossy film that looks down on its characters and their predicaments.  When Rose (Amy Adams) decides that her son’s route to happiness and success is dependent on him going to private school, she enlists the help of her slacker sister Norah (Emily Blunt) and together they decide to set up a crime scene clean up company to raise funds. The narrative briskly sidesteps the problems a woman such as Rose might encounter in setting up a business, racing on to the jovially icky moments about how awful it is to clean up the blood of a recent suicide. There’s also time for philosophical reflection: “It feels wrong that we’re throwing everything away – it’s like we’re erasing her.”

Whenever the sisters walk into a house that appears to need an arduous and tiring tidy, the filmmakers quickly utilise the Sundance aesthetic of bright lights, snappy edits and indie soundtracking to montage their way out of darker territory. There’s a similarly clinical feel in the continual striving to balance moments of humour with a sadder, more wistful tone that soon saps all energy from the narrative. The characterisation is paper-thin and dreadfully tiresome, with the requisite fuckups and breakdowns appearing at exactly the moment you’d expect.  This facile and inane drama is aimed squarely at the middle classes, purporting to reveal what life is like for those on the bottom, but ensuring that they’re played by beautiful, upwardly mobile people for whom success and happiness is easily achievable if only one can believe in the American dream.

James Mansfield